Is “Inner Healing Intelligence” bad?
Inner healing intelligence (IHI) is a concept that dates back thousands of years and can be found in ancient Ayurvedic (prana), Chinese (qi), Greek (pneuma), African (Ase or Umoya), and Native American (Great Spirit) medicine. The concept of IHI holds that there’s a vital life force in all beings that moves toward health. It can be blocked by environmental forces or internal imbalances, but it is always present in every living being.
The IHI concept also has a rich tradition in psychology, dating back to mid-20th-century figures like Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May and Viktor Frankl. The basic idea they promoted was that the human mind trends toward wholeness, vitality, integration, and self-actualization. The tendency toward mental health gets blocked by unhealthy environmental forces ranging from dysfunctional parenting and schooling to a range of experienced traumas and deficiencies.
IHI has now become a central principle in pscyhedelic-assisted therapy (PAT). As states in the U.S. develop their new licensing requirements for PAT, they need to outline what skills therapists/guides should have and what they should know. Colorado’s Office of Natural Medicine released a draft of the training required for licensing psilocybin facilitators in the state. A part of the proposed requirements would be training in the concept of IHI.
I think this is great! But not everyone shares my view. The journalist Jules Evans, who runs a Substack newsletter on psychedelic safety thinks the concept is too spiritual to be included in a government-backed licensing program. He also quoted bioethecist Nese Devenot as agreeing:
“I've spoken at many psychedelic ethics conferences and workshops over the last year, and I've raised concerns about the "inner healing intelligence" at every one of my talks because I find the construct to be so problematic. . . . it is establishing a vocabulary for minimizing complaints and redirecting attention to (e.g., gaslighting) the participant's experience when they are trying to articulate that real harm is occurring. Across the field, the overemphasis to "let go" and "surrender" to the inner healing intelligence can be weaponized in instances of real coercive control.”
Psychotherapist Bill Brennan is also quoted:
I’ve seen sessions in which the IHI is used as a justification for overriding the patient’s self-protective mechanisms. Certain overly dogmatic applications of the IHI concept may lead therapists to pressure the patient to trust the wisdom of whatever arises, even in moments when it might be more supportive to tap the brakes and exert some judiciousness about how to relate to what’s arising.
It’s no doubt laudable to try to protect people from harm, especially when the stakes are high, as they are in psychedelic-assisted therapy. But the problem with targeting IHI as “problematic” is that anyone with any experience in PAT knows that it’s the client’s IHI (or whatever else you want to call it), that is doing the work. To eliminate the concept from PAT training and practice is to blind therapists and guides to the central healing force at work.
Healing does not come from the therapist/guide; it does not come from the psychedelic medicine; it does not come from the set and setting. All of these are crucial to the healing process, but only insofar as they provide a container for the client’s IHI to come forth and flow.
The problems that both Devenot and Brennan raise are not with IHI but with facilitators overriding client’s concerns in the name of IHI. This obviously should be a part of PAT training. How should facilitators “relate to what’s arising,” in the word of Brennan? There of course is no clinical, standard answer (as Devenot might want). But compassionate, connected, and non-directive care can go a long way.
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IHI is perhaps the most important non-technical concept any healer of any sort can bring to their work. It can’t be “validated” as Devenot and others might want because IHI in mental and emotional health is not the sort of phenomenon that can be understood through propositional knowledge and “validated” using the scientific method.
IHI happens when we get a cut on our arm. The blood clotting, inflammation, and angiogenesis following a cut on our arm is IHI but we can’t understand and validate it as such within a materialist framework using the scientific method. So instead we reduce the healing down to elements that we can see under a microscope. But we cannot put mental and emotional healing under a microscope, (we infer mental and emotional illness and health from questionnaires) so we must understand such healing through other ways of knowing than the materialist, reductionist approach to science that works so well in other areas.
These ways of knowing are not mystical, but are still empirical. Good therapists have known since Carl Rogers that the human mind tends toward health when it is given space to express and reflect on itself. As Maslow and many others have noted, when humans gain material and social safety, they tend toward self-actualization and self-transcendence.
In response to Jules tweeting about his Substack article, the scientist Robin Carhart-Harris responded with the results of a yet-to-be published study that showed the more PAT participants believed in IHI, the better their mental/emotional health outcomes. This doesn’t prove or validate the existence of IHI—it can never be proven. But it shows what PAT facilitators have known for decades: IHI is crucial in actual practice.
In Internal Family Systems practice, I see IHI every day as clients turn their awareness inside and meet defensive manager parts, or impulsive firefighter parts, or wounded, young exiles. I invite clients to ask parts to step back so they can focus on a single part, most in need of attention and care. And what comes forth—every single time other parts relax back—is this Internal Healing Intelligence.
It’s as real as anything else you can feel inside, and it’s the thing that is doing ALL the healing. I can’t imagine doing emotional health work without the concept of IHI. It would be exhausting; I would be stressed everyday trying to be the source of healing with my own wisdom or skill. Or I would project the stress on to clients, expecting that some combination of will power, discipline, and skill building will solve their problems. Fortunately, I know better.